A Developer's View

July 8th, 2008

Software’s drive to become like television

Posted by John Carroll @ 10:45 am

Categories: Software Infrastructure, Google, Microsoft, XBOX 360

Tags: Software, Advertisement, Microsoft Corp., TV, Tools & Techniques, Games, Management, Personal Technology, John Carroll

Okay, that’s a bit of an opaque blog title. People don’t usually sit around, mouths agape, watching their copy of Microsoft Word the way I did with “The Twilight Zone” marathon on the Sci-Fi channel this past weekend (which makes no sense, as I own the entire series on DVD, but you have to love those 60s special effects).

On any given day, however, I certainly spend more time in front of my computer than in front of my TV (though I may be somewhat extreme, I’m not completely atypical, either; people aren’t watching YouTube regularly on their TVs…yet). Further, I find that more and more of the software products I use don’t cost me anything up-front to buy.

That is certainly the case with most of the web applications I use. An orientation towards “free” seems built into the DNA of web applications, a legacy of the Internet’s early days. That trend was solidified by a 1990s land rush that was all about market share, with little regard to how online companies were supposed to make money for their efforts.

Companies like Google Read the rest of this entry »

July 3rd, 2008

Whither Blu-ray?

Posted by John Carroll @ 10:04 am

Categories: BluRay, Sony, XBOX 360, PlayStation, PS3

Tags: Blockbuster Inc., Blu-ray, DVD, Consumer Electronics, Games, Video On Demand (VoD), Game Players, Hd Dvd, Tv & Home Theater, Personal Technology

I can’t say that I have been watching a lot of movies of late, mostly because I simply lack the time to do so. On weekends, though, I am trying to at least take some time off, so I have been heading out to Santa Monica to wander around the beaches or take long bike rides along the pier (I could ride all the way down to Long Beach if I wanted). I’ve also been renting more movies.

I’ve been interested in the new NetFlix “Video On Demand” set-top box, made by Roku, but I haven’t gotten around to buying one yet. That means I still do the old-fashioned thing and head down to the video store to rent DVDs.

I hadn’t been to Blockbuster in awhile, mostly because I’ve been favoring a 20/20 Video store a few blocks down that is much cheaper and has a wackier film selection. My recent visit gave me a chance to see what they’ve done since Blu-ray “won” the battle over HD-DVD.

As it turns out, not much. The still have maybe four shelves-worth of Blu-ray movies available, and the entire time I was wandering the “new releases” section (which at Blockbuster, means any film released in the last decade, it would appear), I saw no one spending any time in front of it.

That shouldn’t surprise Read the rest of this entry »

June 30th, 2008

A world ruled by Apple

Posted by John Carroll @ 10:36 am

Categories: Apple, Microsoft

Tags: Software, Steve Jobs, Apple Inc., Bill Gates, Hardware, John Carroll

Tributes to Bill Gates littered the blogosphere on Friday for obvious reason, as it was Bill Gates’ last day as a full-time employee at the company he co-founded. This, predictably, rubbed certain people the wrong way, as the success of Bill Gates represents to some the “failure” of their preferred path through software history.

Variations on the disconent theme abounded, but none was more common than the thread which depicted Steve Jobs as the “wizard behind the curtain,” with Gates playing the starring role as the Wicked Witch in an upside-down “Wizard of Oz” where the scarecrow never got his brain, the tin man never got his heart, and Dorothy spent the rest of her life shacked up with a flying monkey in Emerald city.

I don’t understand this zero-sum worldview. I am perfectly willing to praise Apple or Linux when I feel they are doing something right, and do so on a regular basis in this blog. That’s why I have a hard time understanding the need to believe that Gates did nothing right, in spite of abundant evidence to the contrary.

Yes, Jobs and Apple Read the rest of this entry »

June 27th, 2008

Thoughts on Bill Gates

Posted by John Carroll @ 10:49 am

Categories: Microsoft

Tags: Software, Bill Gates, Microsoft Corp., Hardware, Tools & Techniques, Management, John Carroll

When I think of Bill Gates, I can’t help but think back to that famous photo taken of his team shortly before they moved up to Washington State from Albuquerque.  This rag-tag band somehow served as the base for a company that now employs 75,000+ people (including myself, until recently) and is the company that occupies so much of the thinking time of journalists and bloggers who write anything related to the market for software.

How did that team create a company that made Bill Gates, at one point, richer than the combined GDPs of all of Central America (less in 2008 dollars)?

I don’t think you can plan to be that successful. Granted, you can do things that put yourself on one of the tracks in the success-related train station. But as an entrepreneur, all you can do is make your products and pursue every opportunity vigorously in hopes that you are well positioned when fortune comes screeching through the intersection, changing your life forever (not that great success is akin to getting flattened by trains).

There is a healthy Read the rest of this entry »

June 25th, 2008

America’s blocked labor policies

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:15 am

Categories: Economic Policy

Tags: Visa, America, Economy, H-1B, Productivity, Entrepreneurship, Human Resources, Labor Relations, Management, John Carroll

A little known fact about the H-1B work visa program - the special visa used by most foreign technology workers who come to work in the United States - is that fashion models must compete for the same category of visa, a fact about which The Economist reminded me in its June 21st article “Beauty and the Geek.” This was less of a problem when the visa program was more generous and the visa allotment didn’t run out within hours of the start deadline. Ever since the cap was lowered in 2004 and the mad rush for the 65,000 visas allotted per year began, however, models have had a hard time coming to the United States to do fashion shoots…

…well, models who just look good in photographs and don’t regularly appear on the cover of Vogue, as apparently, supermodels qualify for another category of visa due to their “extraordinary ability.” What’s truly humorous about the situation is how a New York congressman, citing the interests of the New York fashion industry, proposed to deal with the problem.

No, he is not proposing that we loosen the restriction on the number of technology workers allowed into this country, a group of people who can be considered vastly more critical to this nation’s economy than fashion models. We need to make a new visa category for fashion models, so they aren’t forced to compete for slots with computer geeks going to work in Silicon Valley.

A comment by Read the rest of this entry »

June 24th, 2008

Why I still prefer Internet Explorer

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:11 am

Categories: Web Technology, Microsoft, Programming

Tags: Opera Software, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Web Browser, CSS, Web Browsers, Scripting Languages, Software/Web Development, Web Development

I wrote a blog post last week where I discussed some of the good lessons from the success of Firefox. I truly believe Firefox is a great browser, and I am glad that competition has forced Microsoft to pull its IE developers out of suspended animation to update its ability to handle CSS properly. Let’s just hope there are no H.R. Giger-inspired aliens on board.

Even so, I do approach the reignition of the browser wars with a certain amount of trepidation. Testing across browsers is a royal pain in the butt, and I’m sorry, I don’t care how “standards compliant” Opera, Safari, Firefox or even IE will claim to be, you would be mad not to test your HTML / CSS / Javascript creation in each and every one.

Well, I’m proud to say I’ve done that, and the service on which I have been busily working for the past several weeks renders properly in all of them.

I can’t say, however, that it wasn’t without work, work which I wouldn’t have to worry about if one browser reigned triumphant. One triumphant browser, however, means the browser doesn’t get updated very often. So, thank goodness for competition.

Even so, I did run into some rather unusual problems. And, as it turned out, the problem wasn’t with IE. Rather, it was with Firefox, Safari and Opera.

Some of the pages Read the rest of this entry »

June 20th, 2008

Cell phone as desktop computer

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:28 am

Categories: Mobile, Apple, Google, Microsoft

Tags: Desktop, Phone, Cell Phone, Computer, Desktop Computer, Telecom & Utilities, Cellular Phones, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, John Carroll

This is a bit of a crazy idea, but it constitutes part of the reason I keep harping on about the importance of full-blown desktop operating systems in cell phones. Yes, it creates developer consistency, meaning that the same skills used to develop apps for desktop computers map directly to cell phones applications. And yes, it means that developments in the desktop OS can be rolled out much faster to the cell phone, as the two environments are, for the most part, one and the same (not exactly, as you have different form factors / UI conventions, but you catch my drift). Both of these things accelerate the important role cell phones are going to play in our daily lives as these devices get more and more powerful.

Think about that growing power. Today, iPhone storage maxes out at 16 GB. Imagine in 10 years, when it could max out at 1.6 terabytes…or more. At those levels, people will start to carry around whole video libraries, every document they have ever created, and, of course, ALL of their music.

Obviously, the application story will have evolved in that time. Applications usable while riding on a bus will still need to accomodate the small screen of a mobile device. With that kind of power, however, a mobile phone in theory could act like an ultra-mobile computer.

This a variation Read the rest of this entry »

June 19th, 2008

Chinese antitrust and Microsoft

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:40 am

Categories: Antitrust, Microsoft

Tags: China, Antitrust, Microsoft Corp., Corporate Law, Government, Security, Business Operations, John Carroll

As reported elsewhere and discussed by other ZDNet bloggers, a new antitrust law will come into effect in China on August 1st, and there is speculation that the Chinese government is using that law as basis for an investigation into the company. Not surprisingly, this brings a smile to the face of those with a habitual dislike of the “beast of Redmond.”

Be careful what you wish for. China is a nation that has just started its journey towards integration into the global trade system, and its government already works fairly hard to tip the playing field towards its own companies. Antitrust, given its wide open nature, is one heck of a tool for mischief in the hands of governments whose real goal is to protect its “national champions.”

Take this quote, grabbed from Richard Koman’s blog:

“On the one hand, global software firms, taking advantage of their monopoly position, set unreasonably high prices for genuine software while on the other hand, they criticise Chinese for poor copyright awareness. This is abnormal.

By that standard, Read the rest of this entry »

June 18th, 2008

Lessons from Firefox 3

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:17 am

Categories: Open Source, Web Technology

Tags: Mozilla Firefox 3.0, Mozilla Firefox, Web Browsers, Internet, John Carroll

I just downloaded the Firefox 3 browser, and if there were problems with their servers before, there certainly are no problems today. The download clocked in under 5 seconds (I do have a fast connection, admittedly), and the install was done in less than a minute. Quite impressive for any piece software, though particularly well-done for something as critical as web browsers.

I’m not going to do a blow-by-blow comparison of the features compared to IE or Safari on Windows, as that’s not my thing, and other people for whom it is their thing would do a much better job of it, anyway. It is on my system, however, and I will use it. If I like it, I will find that it starts to be used more and more.

I am sure, however, that Microsoft wishes they had maintained the standards support of their web browser rather than allowing it to languish in non-standard purgatory for as long as they did. Credit for the fact that Microsoft is pushing forward with better standards compliance is due exclusively to the folks at Firefox. As I’ve noted in the past, it’s less likely people would have paid much attention to Firefox if Microsoft had maintained its lead in standards support that it achieved with IE 4.0.

Firefox demonstrates Read the rest of this entry »

June 13th, 2008

The end of Microhoo

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:30 am

Categories: Microsoft

Tags: Google Inc., Advertisement, Microsoft Corp., John Carroll

…which really isn’t an apt title, as something has to begin for it to end. However, it certainly looks like a merger between Yahoo and Microsoft is unlikely to materialize. This is sure to disappoint Icahn, whose interest in the deal I always viewed with skepticism. He’s good at making money, but the interests of short-term profit from sale of stock aren’t always in line with long-term growth.

My big issue with the proposed merger was that I couldn’t figure out how Microsoft was supposed to take a sinking search-related software giant, add it to their own small search share, and result in something that would make $43 billion seem like a good way to spend Microsoft’s money. Like I’ve said before, I understand why Microsoft would want to boost market share for its ad platform (the real motivation for the Yahoo deal), as ad platforms are likely to be more important in an Internet world where many services are offered to customers for free, monetized by ads.

My concerns were both practical - would a merger with Yahoo really boost Microsoft’s search share enough to pose credible competition to Google - and cultural - would it be possible to merge Yahoo’s 16,000 employees into Microsoft. On the latter point, I think it would have served as a huge distraction from the real work necessary to counter Google’s advertising heft, which currently emphasizes too much the need to pose a frontal assault on Google’s dominance in Internet search.

I think a better Read the rest of this entry »